I wonder if Mr. Coates would say that no Korean should ever forgive the Japanese, that no Greek should ever forgive the Turks, that no Irishman should ever forgive the English.

I wonder if Mr. Coates would say that that no Jew should ever forgive Germany. After all — and this is in no way intended to lessen the terrible history of slavery in the US and elsewhere — Hitler killed ten times as many Jews as the total number of slaves imported into the United States in the nearly 250 years prior to the civil war, and nearly twice as many as the entire slave population of the United States in 1850.

As a Jew, I admit it hasn’t been easy, even though I was born two decades after the end of World War II, to consider each German I meet as an individual rather than just tar them with the brush of their country’s brutal (and relatively recent) history. But, especially when I was living in Europe and traveling to Germany for tourism or on business, I did just that and found most Germans to be like most people in any other western country.

But Mr. Coates gives me, a white guy, no such benefit of the doubt — even though the first part of my ancestry to arrive in the United States came through Ellis Island decades after the Civil War, even though hundreds of thousands of white Americans sacrificed their lives in that war to end slavery, and, on a political note, even though the civil rights movement’s strongest white supporters — as well as most leading abolitionists more than a century earlier — were Republicans.

The effect and intent of the words of Lemon and Hill and Coates are to divide Americans along racial lines, to instill anger and mistrust and jealousy and bitterness. It helps their ratings; it helps them sell magazines; it helps them line up more speaking engagements. It makes them feel good about themselves — by making one part of society hate another part.

But their views are a national cancer which, perhaps surprisingly to some, is metastasizing more rapidly under our first black president than at any time in the nearly five decades I have been alive.

In fact, it should surprise no one. Barack Obama is not foremost a black president; he is a Progressive Alinskyite president who happens to be black, a follower of a man who preached division as a political tactic, and the employer of a man, Attorney General Eric Holder, who said (while in his previous job), “I am the black United States attorney…[T]here’s a common cause that bonds the black United States attorney with the black criminal….” As former DoJ attorney Christian Adams put it, that’s the real race card.

"There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. "

From My Larger Education, Being Chapters from My Experience (1911). Sad how this self defeating scam continues to work after a hundred years.

By Mr. Coates's logic, blacks (as well as other people) should never forgive the Democratic Party for past mistakes fostering and maintaining slavery-- the Missouri Compromise, Stephen A. Douglas' Popular Sovereignty -- or for the Dred Scott Decision (Chief Justice Taney was Democrat); or for founding the KKK and the Night Riders' for disenfranchising Black voters in the South after Reconstruction with poll taxes; for Bull Connor and Jim Crow laws; for George Wallace; and lately for Grand Kleagle Sen. Robert Byrd.